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About this project

Joel & Ethan's Christmas Road Trip Documentary is about our cross-country road trip taking place during the Christmas season of 2012. We'll leave Los Angeles on December 14th, and arrive in Portland, Maine, on December 22nd. We're stopping at all kinds of places along the way, like Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, Boston, and some small towns in between.

We're going to experience the Christmas atmosphere in our nation's biggest cities, and smallest towns. Our goal is to do as many things from our list as possible as we drive across the country, and we invite you to use Twitter and Facebook to add to our list.

We suspect that the making of the documentary itself will be a big part of the documentary, and we intend to be very transparent about the process. We're not going to spend our time concealing microphones, you'll see them. We won't act like we just happened to stumble across something interesting if we actually planned it--we're not good enough to pull that off.

We're going to shoot as if we're making a 20 minute episode for each day. We intend to edit that down to an 80 minute final film, but if for some reason we actually end up with enough compelling footage to make several 20 minute episodes, we'll do that. Once we've shot everything, we'll see what we can do as far as distribution, but it will be made available online. That probably goes without saying these days.

We have our website, Twitter, and Facebook set up so that anyone who wants to keep updated on our progress or make suggestions can do that easily. If you back our project, make sure you follow us so you can see our blog posts, pictures and videos from the trip as it's happening, stay updated throughout the post-production process with short clips and outtakes, and be the first to know when we finish.

Risks and challenges

There are a lot of challenging aspects of this project. We both went to film school, and we know how to use the equipment, but it's a lot to do. We'll have to always be making sure we have good audio, take time to get the coverage necessary to give our viewers a good experience, and stay interesting so people actually want to watch. Just dealing with the amount of footage we're going to end up with will be overwhelming. Editing this is going to be a nightmare. As long as we stay organized, we'll be alright.

The driving in itself will be a bit of a challenge, because it's about 3,300 miles. We've done a lot of road trips together, but this will be the longest. Staying friendly towards each other might be a challenge, too, but if we start getting on each other's nerves, it will probably be more entertaining.

We can handle the driving, shooting, and editing, but the biggest challenge of this project is promoting it. We hope that having a To-Do List that people can add to will be enough to pique your interest, but we don't know. All we can do is tell you our plan and hope you'll give us the opportunity to entertain you with our Christmas Road Trip Documentary.